David Wright

The University of Warwick · Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies

Culture, Class, Distinction is major contribution to international debates regarding the role of cultural capital in relation to modern forms of inequality. Drawing on a national study of the organisation of cultural practices in contemporary Britain, the authors review Bourdieu’s classic study of the relationships between culture and class in the...

Understanding Cultural Taste updates and critiques established theoretical and empirical accounts of cultural taste. It considers the roles of the cultural industries and cultural policies in shaping tastes and the significance of the technologies through which cultural goods are produced and circulated. Taking a historical and theoretical perspect...

This chapter draws on research and scholarship into the experience of creative labour to reflect on the place of hope in understanding the creative economy. The policy imaginary of the creative economy synonymizes creativity with innovation. The creative industries themselves are claimed to have unleashed some much needed dynamism into sluggish pos...

The 21st century has seen the rise of a new phenomenon – the creation of statues and monuments celebrating the lives of entertainers. Drawing on debates about popular culture, placemaking and heritage, and in the context of recent controversies about the politics of statues and memorials, this paper examines a manifestation of this phenomenon as re...

In this paper, a change to the remit and title of a UK government department provides a starting point for reflection on the growing role of digital technologies in the re-imagination of UK cultural policy. An early strategic report produced by the re-named DCMS was entitled Culture is Digital. Identifying the UK’s cultural and technology sectors a...

An editorial introducing a second special issue on Evaluating Cities and Capitals of Culture

This chapter reexamines foundational philosophical controversies about the meaning of taste and reflects on how tastes have been understood by sociologists. It argues these insights, while revealing the social patterning of tastes, have also obscured the extent to which tastes are bound up both with sensory experience and with the process of learni...

Like other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, cultural policy studies has had to respond to the influence of computing technologies. Researchers have explored the changes wrought to the management of cultural organisations, to the models of the creative industries and to new forms of access to culture and the arts. This paper su...

This chapter uses debates about the figure of the cultural omnivore to reflect on how scholars within the sociology of culture have approached the problem of 'cultural consumption'. Briefly introducing the concept of omnivorousness, and placing it in the context of longer sociological debates about the role of cultural consumption in social organis...

This chapter considers the changing visions of the cultural consumer that emerge from historical and contemporary research into 'consumer societies'. These visions play out, the chapter will argue through some perennial debates, stretching back to at least the sixteenth century and intensifying across the late twentieth, about the processes and mea...

This chapter considers the role of digital forms of technology as a final dimension that gives shape to contemporary cultural tastes. In doing so it considers some scholarship on the social role of these technologies and characterizes them, like the critics, reviewers and intermediaries described in the previous chapter, as part of the infrastructu...

Taste remains an intriguing and perplexing problem for scholarly analysis — and specifically for analysis within the sociology of culture. It is also a complex problem that, as I hope the preceding discussion of the various dimensions of taste indicates, requires more than either an assumption of its equivalence to rational forms of choice and pref...

This chapter sets out to explore how tastes are produced. As such it builds on the approach outlined in earlier chapters which emphasizes the extent to which our experience and understanding of tastes do not emerge naturally from a sensory engagement with the world but are shaped by various social and cultural processes. Many of these processes mig...

What does it mean to be a person of good taste in the early twenty-first century? How does one become one, and why should one bother? This book is an attempt to explore what is still at stake in these questions and to consider why cultural taste remains a matter of concern for both social life and academic scholarship. It should be made clear at th...

The focus of this chapter is on the role that strategies of government play in giving shape to taste, with a particular focus on questions of policy. The chapter will argue that relations between taste and the political context in which tastes are contained are something of a hidden dimension and one with both a significant history and a revealing...

This chapter extends the conceptual reach of our discussion of taste to incorporate a direct engagement with the global. In keeping with the general aim of the book to examine debates about tastes in a number of dimensions which are often kept separate and distinct, it explores how questions of taste have been, and continue to be, shaped by process...

This chapter sets out to provide a summary and critique of the foundations of the theoretical problem of taste. It has a central preoccupation with the sociology of taste, but arriving at this requires reflection on accounts of taste which pre-date the establishment of a coherent discipline of sociology, including philosophical and historical accou...

This chapter examines the ways in which claims about tastes are established methodologically, and the various techniques of data-gathering and analysis upon which these claims are based. It does this in the light of what philosophers of social science refer to as ontologkal and epistemological questions. What kind of ‘stuff is taste? What constitut...

This chapter examines recent changes and continuities in the retail book trade and reflects on their effects on the role of intermediaries in ‘the world of books’. It considers the development of bookshop work alongside the shifting modes of organization in the book trade in the late twentieth century and the accompanying narratives of the bookshop...

Drawing on two projects which develop the methodological model of Bourdieu’s Distinction in the UK and Finland, this paper explores the issues raised by the use of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and mixed methods in comparative work on cultural tastes. By identifying the problems in the construction of two comparable yet nationally relevant...

Abstract This paper adds a comparative perspective to the study of taste, cosmopolitanism and social organisation. Drawing on material provided by two similar projects in the UK and Finland it explores the relationships between national and cosmopolitan taste cultures. Whilst there have been some recent attempts to study taste in a comparative pers...

The ways in which we come to know, like, and choose books at the start of the twenty-first century suggest that a reconsideration of some established theoretical narratives about literary taste is merited. This chapter introduces and develops the concept of "list culture" as a means of investigating these issues. The starting point for this analysi...

This paper offers some speculative discussion about the current state of the “omnivore” debate, instigated by Richard A. Peterson. It argues that debates about the social patterning of tastes need to take greater account of changed practices of cultural production as well as consumption through the identification of two “stories of abundance” in th...

In recent years, strong claims have been made for the breakdown of national boundaries and the reformation of national identities in an increasingly interconnected global world – driven in large part by the possibilities and limitations that emerge from an increasingly global media world. It has been argued that new postnational, cosmopolitan subje...

This paper discusses the use of material generated in a mixed method investigation into cultural tastes and practices, conducted in Britain from 2003 to 2006, which employed a survey, focus groups and household interviews. The study analysed the patterning of cultural life across a number of fields, enhancing the empirical and methodological templa...

The article discusses the significance of cultural capital for the understanding of the field of housing in contemporary Britain. It explores the relationship between housing and the position of individuals in social space mapped out by means of a multiple correspondence analysis. It considers the material aspects of housing and the changing contex...

This paper reflects on the relationships between methods and meaning-making in social research. It focuses on two core issues: (1) the problems with the generation of data inherent in quantitative and qualitative methods themselves, accentuated and revealed by processes of mixing them, and (2) the implications of the asymmetrical relationship betwe...

This paper uses the findings from a new study of cultural tastes and participation in the UK to explore the characteristics of the cultural omnivore. It identifies some uncertainty in the existing literature about the precise elements of an omnivorous orientation in relation to (i) the relative importance of volume and composition of omnivorous tas...

The concept of omnivorousness has become influential in the sociologies of culture and consumption, cited variously as evidence of altered hierarchies in cultural participation and as indicative of broader socio-cultural changes. The 'omnivore thesis' contends that there is a sector of the population of western countries who do and like a greater v...

Sociological accounts of the literary field emphasise the ways it is institutionally shaped and how actors within it make claims to cultural authority. These accounts include consideration of reviewing as a social or institutional practice and the role of literary prizes in the production and management of esteem. Much of this research draws on the...

The literary field has been conceptualised in social scientific work as patterned in particular ways. Historically, popular reading has been linked with contested processes of social change. Tastes for reading have, following Bourdieu, been seen as embedded in continuing processes of distinction and the making of hierarchies. Research has demonstra...

This article argues for a focus on the relationships between retail managers, workers and the objects that they sell in understanding the production of retail spaces and service interactions as meaningful. Sociological and critical management literatures on the service encounter have emphasized the extent to which retail workers are encouraged to d...

The paper addresses the relationship between the democratic potential for participation and equality in focus group research (Johnson, 1996) in relation to the investigation of patterns of distinctions of taste and social position that generate social exclusion, as revealed in the ongoing Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion (CCSE) research projec...

This paper examines recent debates about the role of what Bourdieu termed cultural intermediaries in the formation and reproduction of the relations of cultural capital. Workers in the cultural or creative industries were given a central place in Bourdieu's schema in the creation of hierarchies of value in the production and consumption of symbolic...

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the survey components of an ESRC project on Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion focused on the relations of culture and class in contemporary Britain. It draws on the data produced by a national survey of the cultural activities, preferences and knowledges of 1700+ adult UK residents. Administered in...

About the book: La connaissance est devenue une composante essentielle du travail et des métiers contemporains. Savoir, travail et Société a pour but de faire connaître à l'échelle internationale les recherches portant sur les formes de production et d'usage du savoir dans le monde professionnel. Ce numéro présente les contributions de spécialistes...

This thesis uses the empirical setting of the UK retail book trade to critically assess sociological accounts of work and consumption and their relationship to the self. Drawing on talk with bookshop workers, representations of the book-trade and trade press, it examines the ways in which the book-trade is historically constructed, both as a market...

The book begins with a reflection of the practice of reading, which argues that the image of the solitary reader and the apparently intensely private experience of reading itself belie what Long terms its ‘social infrastructure’. This infrastructure connects reading with processes of socialization and with the institutional practices of those engag...

C. Lodziak (2002) The Myth of Consumerism, Pluto Press, London. S. Miles, A. Anderson and K. Meetham (eds) (2002) The Changing Consumer: Markets and Meanings, Routledge, London and New York.